Portable music players and portable telephones are becoming increasingly common. Owners of these and similar devices often prefer to use them in conjunction with personal sound delivery devices. These devices are worn, for example, while driving (e.g. telephone headset), exercising, traveling, or studying or the like.
Nearly all music players and portable phones have earbuds as a standard accessory, but these one-size-fits-all earbuds often do not stay in the user's ears or become uncomfortable over time.
Proper fitting earbuds or in custom ear monitors can provide the benefit of ambient noise isolation or suppression similarly to how earplugs block sound. However, stock earbuds often do not fit well enough to accomplish this.
In an attempt to address the above described earbud fit problems some companies offer kits of different size earbud adapters. The user selects, through a process of trial and error, the earbud adapter that fits his ear the best. While the probability of a better fit is thus increased, it is still inadequate because the variation in human ear anatomy is too great to be accommodated with a kit that is necessarily limited in its range of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, this approach requires the user to try on each earbud adapter and determine, sometimes over several hours use, if it provides the best fit. Finally, once the optimal earbud adapter is selected, the remaining ones are useless and this results in material waste. Some companies provide a single flexible or compliant earbud adapter where the user is able to adjust its shape and size and/or the material is able to be compressed and then expand to conform to the inner surfaces of the user's ear anatomy. This flexibility or compliance partially addresses the above mentioned problems with kits, but the extent of the flexibility or compliance is necessarily limited to provide optimal results for a small range of anatomy centered on the average ear. When purchasing this product, the user will typically not know in advance whether his ears will fall within the range of the adapter's accommodation which typically creates areas of pressure on known pain points within the ear.
To solve the above mentioned problems other companies supply full custom earbuds or earbud adapters. They do this by first injecting a soft material into the user's ear to form a physical impression or mould. The mould supplies the ear shape information that is then used to manufacture the custom fitted earbud or earbud adapter. While this full custom approach solves many of the problems outlined above, it requires a significant amount of skilled labor which elevates the production cost. Production costs are further increased because the full custom approach necessarily precludes mass production. Additionally, the user must undergo the moulding process which can be uncomfortable, scary and time consuming. And finally, the user must wait several business days while the custom solution is built and shipped. In this model, a custom fit earbud may require skilled labor to eliminate pressure points in areas known to be painful within the ear such as the Crus of Helix, the Tragus, the Anti-Tragus and the Anti-Helix.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.